A vacation rental marketplace in which disparate owners of second or vacation homes make their properties available to vacationers has experienced increasing growth recently. In a vacation rental marketplace, a family or a group of people (e.g., group of friends) may rent anything from cabins, condominiums, summer homes, to villas, barns, farm houses, and castles. These types of rental properties are desirable as typical hotel or motel buildings are not well-suited to accommodate families or groups of people, and are usually less private and less comforting to some guests.
With the advent of networked computing devices, the computer-based renting of properties electronically has enabled travelers to more readily enjoy the experiences of renting others' homes. However, some conventional techniques and known technological approaches to renting properties rely on relatively open forms of communication between a potential traveler and an owner of a rental property, whereby the exchanged communications are vulnerable to access by third parties. Such exposure presents opportunities for identity theft, fraud, and other criminal or mischievous activities. As an example, one type of fraud can arise when a third-party hijacks a rental property owner's email account with which a thief may fraudulently induce a potential traveler to expose, for example, credit card information.
Further, conventional computing devices commonly used to facilitate traditional vacation rental marketplaces are not well-suited to detect whether a potential traveler or a putative owner are authentic prior to exposure to risks or disadvantages due to, for example, a fraudulent traveler and/or owner.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for forming a secured communications channel effectively in association with a computerized rental system without the limitations of conventional techniques.